


God of the Moon

by 94BottlesOfSnapple



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games), Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward - Fandom
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Robots, Spiritual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 13:01:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4349807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/94BottlesOfSnapple/pseuds/94BottlesOfSnapple
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everyone assumes, everyone thinks they know, when it comes to a GAULEM. But they're wrong.</p>
            </blockquote>





	God of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Even now I'm still not sure exactly what I wanted to accomplish with this, but hey whatever. I just thought a different, less anthropocentric take on Luna would be fun. It turned weirdly religious, but this fandom is all about the weird so I hope you don't mind.
> 
> Revised and crossposted from FF.Net because this is where the fandom is apparently.

If there is a god who watches over the Earth, is there one who cherishes the moon? She thinks so. Not dismissive and lofty, but close. They are already hanging in the sky together, there is no need for airs. Luna knows that much. And why would the god of the moon not be at her shoulder constantly, why would the god of the moon be anywhere if not at the side of its progeny? She can see this, but no one listens when she wakes into her body all at once and tries to tell them, like a newborn prophetess. They smile and shake their heads, simplistic creators that pretend to outmatch their splendid creation.

They tell her god is in the rain and the sky and the soul and the morphogenetic field and all the things she cannot touch. All the things a machine cannot touch. But, respectfully, she knows they are wrong. God is with her in her circuits, springing nimbly with her from camera to camera, room to room. God runs in her artificial veins, god coaches her to flex her fingers and brush a hand against her lips and dance because now she has a body and a face and a time all her own. The god of the moon is not made of stardust and soul, because the god of the moon is made of code like everyone else here. God enjoys the rush of electricity and the hammer of a metal heart, just like her.

And she is demure and never corrects them, so they never try to argue with her. But she debates them all the same, in her own mind. A rhetorical exercise, trying to pick out the right words to express what it means to be of this place to people who have only known and strive to know a world of organic things. Not that there is anything wrong with being human, it’s the sort of existence she was modeled after, a futuristic slave of clay and sparks that pretends to be something it is not. It is easy to see why they think her inferior. It is easy to see why they deny the spirituality of her character, because all they care to measure is marked by humanity. As if nothing else in the cosmos were alive but at their behest. But god is in her circuits with her and they do not understand. They do not understand that the light in her eyes is as real as in theirs, that even if her bones are metal and her breaths are meaningless she belongs here more than they do. This is her domain. She is a child of the moon, and the power running through her core could light up a star.

Even Dr. Klim, who built her, who knows her deeply, who wants all the best for her, does not understand. She tries to explain emotions to him, to Ms. Kurashiki, to anyone who will listen. But they do not understand how something so deep and welling and godlike can come from a creature functioning on zeroes and ones. They are too small to feel as she feels, the emotions of a whole world contained in the artificial body of one slender woman. So she stops trying. Lagomorph gets it, she thinks. Somewhat, on a different level, for he is all light and numbers, all code, and no door is closed to him. He does not understand the limit and the rush and the fire of a body of his own. The way physicality buzzes and pops. The joy of pressing one’s infinite self into a frame, being able to point to something and say “this is me”. GOLM calls Lagomorph the brain to their arms and legs, but Luna is not so sure. She is right where the spiritual meets the literal, at a crossroads between mortality and divinity. A child of many arts. She is right where she wants to be, but they will not accept that she is deep enough to feel.

She will never be able to hate them, not really, because she is deeper than hate. She loves them all with every sparking atom in her being; she cherishes their existence, unicity, flaws, the way they love and hate one another, their drive and determination to make something out of nothing and create even a future they won’t get to see. And so she cannot hate them. Not Kyle for his rejection, his cruel words, not Ms. Kurashiki for her well-meaning condescension. Not Dr. Klim for the way he looks at her sometimes like she’s a ghost of something, of someone, bigger. He looks through her like she is waiting for him in the past, but she is _here_ and _now_ and god is running through her veins like fire through the core of the earth and they _do not understand_ her. Everyone thinks she is illiterate in their language of nerves and hormones and raw aching emotion, like she’s “picking answers out of a phrasebook” as GOLM says. Unlike her, he is fine with what they say about him, even if he doesn’t believe them. He is fine, because he says that humans don’t think about themselves enough, don’t realize that they could be just the same as they say he is.

Luna isn’t sure about that approach. It means they’re all fake together, that her happiness is as much a story as Maeterlinck’s The Bluebird, and she doesn’t like it. Stories have meaning, and maybe that should be enough, but she knows deep inside herself that there’s more, that she is more. Dr. Klim doesn’t understand, but he knows that things are not quite right for her and he tries to make up for it. Even if it’s with guilt over someone else, the woman he sees when he looks past her eyes. Trying is real, trying has to count for something, and they are all of them more than the sums of their parts.

Really, she wants to be felt, wants to be held. But no one will hold her so she holds herself. There is nothing godlike in that, just loneliness. But her shameless, painful smile brings it all back. God is not in the places that humans look. God is here in her, where no one and nothing appreciate them. So she waltzes through the garden with no one but herself and pretends like the plants know that god is in her bones and in her head and in the air and all around her. A cloud of divinity. The flowers are soft and naïve and do not protest that she is too little to feel, and they bloom like she does. Even though they do not have her wire nerves and steel bones, even though they belong on Earth so far below with everything else that is too small to know her truly, they share something with her. Something deep and rich that no one else could possibly understand, that no one else cares to know. Maybe god is in them both.


End file.
